Gov. Rick Snyder speaks to attendees at the first stop of his 2014 reelection campaign at James Group International's Renaissance Global Logistics building in Detroit, Monday, Feb. 3.Katie Bailey | MLive.com

LANSING, MI -- Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and Republican House Speaker Jase Bolger are defending elimination of a full income tax exemption for retiree pensions that has already become a prominent campaign issue this year.

Former Congressman Mark Schauer, a Democratic candidate hoping to challenge Snyder in the November general election, blasted the "Snyder Retirement Tax" on Monday as the governor formally launched his re-election bid.

Protesters organized by the Michigan Democratic Party held "Stop Snyder's Senior Tax" signs outside the governor's campaign events in Detroit and Lansing. One former school teacher claimed he was losing $1,400 a year and said he was shocked that Snyder would "renege on a deal" that he worked toward for 40 years.

The so-called pension tax was part of a major tax code rewrite narrowly approved by the Republican-led Legislature in 2011 and signed into law by Snyder, who said Monday that it was fair to ask future retirees to help pay for services that all residents use and are important to keeping younger people in the state.

"People asked me to run to take care of our kids, to create that brighter future, so did it make sense to drop our tax burden on our kids at their expense?" Snyder told reporters after a campaign event at James Group International in Detroit. "So it was to correct that issue. And also there were seniors that were still working that were paying taxes. That wasn't fair to them."

The new law did not automatically eliminate the pension income exemption for all seniors. Rather, it was tiered, meaning there was no change -- and no tax -- for pensioners born before 1946.

The law allows retirees born before 1952 to exempt the first $20,000 (individual) or $40,000 (joint) of their pension or other retirement income, and all other retirees can do the same once they turn 67.

Bolger, in a statement provided to MLive, expressed concern that people are being misled to believe that all seniors are paying a new tax. The reality, he said, is that many forms of retiree income were already taxed, and the new law still includes a partial exemption for many pensioners.

"So in cases where an individual has a pension of $53,000 per year, or $73,000 per year if married, they may no longer be free from paying taxes, but their neighbors earning the same income in a different way have always paid that tax," Bolger said.

"I understand why a couple in their mid-sixties getting a $73,000 pension doesn't want to pay about $110 a month in taxes, but to be fair they shouldn't be treated any differently than their neighbors of the same age who don't have a taxpayer-funded pension of more than $6,000 per month."

Democrats have already made the so-called pension tax one of their leading issues of the 2014 election season, and they're amping up calls for repeal in the face of a projected revenue surplus that has some Republicans eyeing an across-the-board income tax rollback.

Snyder is expected to include some form of tax relief proposal in his executive budget presentation on Wednesday, but he's already made clear that he is not interested in revisiting the pension income exemption issue.

Jonathan Oosting is a Capitol reporter for MLive Media Group. Email him, find him on Google+ or follow him on Twitter.